4th Grade Gifted Magnet students need culturally diverse and relevant literature for our classroom library.
Our school consists of a population of 31% of English Language learners and 73% receive free and/or reduced lunch.
Because of their unique backgrounds, I want to provide my students with diverse curriculum as well as equally diverse books in our classroom library to engage in discussions around valuing the differences amongst us. Then they can use these discussions as a foundation to build upon their literacy skills.
The goal of our classroom is to engage critically with all content we have access to and challenge each other's perceptions by using the critical media framework questions "Who created this?" "Who benefits?" "Why was this created?" etc. Since my students are academically advanced, I want to challenge them through these conversations so they can then question their own ideas. In order to transform the system, we have to question it first. When students gain access to narratives that are not only reflective of themselves but also different from what they know, they become more open-minded; simultaneously, they can also question the dominant narratives and find the counter.
My Project
This upcoming August, I will be working as a first year teacher in a gifted magnet public school setting with about 34 fourth grade students. My school serves predominately low income and socioeconomically disadvantaged students from a wide array of cultural backgrounds.
As a first year teacher, collecting a classroom library is tough with limited resources.
Furthermore, it becomes even more challenging when you want your students to have access to narratives that are not only relevant to them, but also ones they are not as familiar with in order to help combat the biases and preconceived notions we all have.
Since, I am implementing a balanced literacy approach in my classroom, my students will be participating in Reader's and Writer's workshops and therefore need to have an abundant classroom library. Through my use of mentor texts to model different literacy strategies, students will be able to then apply them to their books that they will have access to from our library. I want my students to have high quality literature that they engage with on a daily basis to continue to foster their love for reading and improve their comprehension and analytical skills. This list contains books that my students will be able to check out from our classroom library to interact with in a critical manner but also to practice various reading strategies in order to better understand the content. They will be able to read these books independently and I will also be able to use these books as a part of my instruction.
For me this library is the start to an ever growing collection. So I know as a first year teacher, I will be forever grateful for everyone who
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